After finally taking the plunge and deciding to take a year off to travel around the world, we are documenting our trip as we go. From the initial planning stages to the trip home, this is our journey.

Sunday, 1 July 2012

Camping Culture

I don’t
mean sleeping-on-the-street homeless, but rather living without a house or an
apartment. Living as a nomad. Living on the road.

Living out of a van.

Two
months ago, that would have sounded like my personal hell, but it’s amazing
what some nice weather and a few good personal encounters can do to a girl.

As you may
have guessed, we are still travelling around Australia in our camper van and
are continuing to enjoy it immensely. What has changed, however, is that we
have recently become aware of just how spoiled we are with our nice home on
wheels, complete with standing room, electricity and running water. We were
feeling pretty adventurous indeed until we met some real campers, ones who put our perceived discomfort to shame. These guys weren’t camping for a week or two, or even a month or two; they were camping
for a year.

And get this: they- the two of them- were living out of a hatchback
car.

That, my
friends, is some badass homelessness.

If their
lifestyle was out of necessity, I probably wouldn’t be waxing poetic about
their life choices, but this couple was choosing to live extremely simply (and
cheaply) so that they could travel indefinitely. Two web designers with their
own company, they tour around Australia with their laptops and a wireless modem
so as to work remotely along the way. They stay at free campsites or wild camp
in the bush and only spend money on gas and food, the expense of which is
minimal as they often fish or gather wild produce for meals.As a result of their simple lifestyle, they
are actually saving money while they
travel.

Needless to say, we want to be them.

True, they
live in a car, but since they essentially follow the warm season, their converted car only
serves as a bed.Their kitchen is a
beach-side barbeque pit or a camp fire in the bush, their living room is
whatever naturally fetching place they decide to call home for a few days. (For
the more practically-minded, rest assured that there are plenty of public
bathrooms and showers available for those who look for them.) Some days, they
work for their business, but often their time is spent fishing, hiking, reading
and cooking- all outdoors.

Tell me
that doesn’t sound like the life.

Now, if
they were the only ones living that way, we might not feel so pampered in our
big van (yes, the same one that I complained was uncomfortably cramped a week
ago), but they are by no means an anomaly. At the same campsite where we met
these guys, we also met not one, not two, but three different couples- who, coincidentally, were all French- who
were doing long-term camping stints out of a van. And not a camper van. A van
van.

And what,
you may ask, did we, the embarrassingly non-adventurous, painfully pampered
quasi-campers do when confronted with the real thing?

We faked
it, of course.

Basically,
we pretended to be way more hardcore then we actually are, or in truth, will
probably ever be. While the others were comparing stories about sneaking into
hostels to shower, lamenting about being stuck in the bush for ten days after a
flood and sharing which public sports complex was best to camp in, Vincent and
I were nodding gravely and sharing knowing looks, while silently making a
mental note never to complain about the capacity of our camper’s water tank ever
again.

But you
can’t blame us, these people were awesome. We would have renounced our giant
camper van Chunk just to be part of their little camping community.

That’s
another thing we loved about pretending to be homeless: the sense of
camaraderie among the campers in the free sites. You see, at the expensive ($30
a night!) caravan parks, we see only vacationers and rich retirees: hardly the
most interesting of the camping world. I guess that’s the price you pay for hot
showers and laundry facilities. But at the free campsites, you get the lifers,
the gray nomads, the homeless. All of those who literally live, full time, out of their vehicles.
Be it a hatchback or a converted bus, these people are at once perplexing and
inspiring. We kinda wish we were that cool.

The homes of the homeless

But, alas,
we are not. At least not on this trip.

It does
make you think though. We’ve met several couples of all ages, even some
families with kids, who own nothing but what they can fit in their mobile home
and live a nomadic life in the truest sense of the word. They travel around
Australia in complete freedom, going wherever they please, spending the days
how they want, stopping when the view is good and creating new friendships at
each campsite.When you consider all of
that, even living in a bus sounds oddly tempting. We have loved travelling around in a camper van, maybe living out of one
wouldn’t be all that bad.

Sorry Vincent, a Crocodile Dundee hat does not make you a real camper.

But before you start thinking that we are going to give up all of our worldly possessions and live in a van down by the river, let it be known that we just dropped a small fortune (by backpacking standards, at least) on Aboriginal art to send back home.